U.S. China-bashing reaches a new low

By
Deirdre Griswold

Published Dec 23, 2009 2:54 PM

Ever since the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which the United States never ratified,
the capitalist political establishment in Washington has focused on one thing:
trying to put the onus on China for the lack of any binding world agreement
that could prevent catastrophic climate change.

The recent Copenhagen summit saw a repeat of this U.S. duplicity, despite the
hopes of many environmentalists and poorer countries that the Obama
administration would set a new course.

New Scientist, a British weekly, reported that the U.S. brokered a last-minute,
nonbinding deal at Copenhagen that pushed aside the agreement, hammered out by
the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which would have set limits on
emissions. Instead of signing a commitment to specific numbers, countries were
pressured to be listed as “taking note” of the deal. U.N. sources
told the magazine that only countries on the list would receive funds to cope
with the impacts of climate change and reduce their carbon emissions.

“Western leaders,” said the Dec. 19 article, left the conference
claiming to have secured “a global agreement to keep global warming below
two degrees Celsius. But the deal provoked immediate anger for failing to
include concrete measures to reach that target, and scientists at the talks
said it would set the world on a path to 3.5ºC of warming by 2100.

“The Western leaders responded to the accusations that the text was
stripped of any concrete measures by blaming China and other developing nations
for the failure of the Copenhagen conference to achieve more.”

For many years, Washington refused to acknowledge the impact of greenhouse gas
emissions (GGE) on climate change, totally ignoring the warnings of climate
scientists. The Bush administration, especially, was preoccupied with
protecting the profits of the energy companies that hold such power over the
levers of government.

Greenpeace in 2005 made public State Department documents showing that the Bush
administration actually sent letters of thanks to ExxonMobil for its
“active involvement” in determining the government’s climate
change policy.

During this whole period, the U.S. was spewing out more greenhouse gases than
any other country. Yet it said again and again that it couldn’t ratify an
agreement like Kyoto. Why? Because while it somewhat curbed the emissions of
the rich developed countries that have been responsible for the lion’s
share of GGE, it gave latitude to those formerly colonized countries trying to
overcome decades and even centuries of underdevelopment. China, Brazil, India
and Mexico are among the largest of these developing economies.

Because of this undeniable history, the peoples of the world rightly view the
U.S. government as the main culprit for the probability that before the middle
of this century, a “tipping point” will be reached that would make
global warming irreversible and bring disaster to many nations.

Deflecting world anger with lies

At the Copenhagen summit, just as George W. Bush had done before him, President
Barack Obama tried to deflect the anger of the world’s people by accusing
China of being the stumbling block to a meaningful agreement. At the same time,
he claimed “success” in pushing through the final deal.

What came out of Copenhagen, however, is nothing but a wish list. It is barely
even a verbal concession to the 100,000-plus people who came to demonstrate
outside, or to the 192 countries that sent representatives.

After two weeks of discussion and debates, the agenda was taken over by the
imperialists, led by the U.S., and an agreement that scientists and economists
had labored over for months was scrapped for a document that committed no one
to anything. However, it dangled in front of the most impoverished nations the
possibility of billions of dollars for green development — most of it
beginning 10 years from now.

Oxfam, an anti-poverty organization based in Britain, warns that these offers
are full of “caveats and loopholes.” It also estimated that even
$100 billion a year would amount to less than half what poor countries need to
obtain the technology for green development.

New Scientist also reported that climate consultants say loopholes in the
document “could allow developed nations to carry on increasing their
emissions until 2020.” The U.S. now emits 17 percent more greenhouse
gases than it did in 1990 — the benchmark year of the Kyoto Protocol,
which called for developed countries to reduce their emissions to 5 percent
below that year’s level by 2012.

The fact is that the U.S. has done practically nothing toward reducing GGE.
This is clear when one considers the state of the economy today. Because of a
crisis of capitalist overproduction, many businesses have closed down or
curtailed their rate of production. Tens of millions of workers are unemployed
and are cutting back on heating, travel and other energy-consuming activities
because they just don’t have the money. U.S. corporations have been
moving factories and jobs overseas in search of higher profits through cheaper
labor. Yet emissions here continue to rise — proof that the government
has done nothing meaningful.

‘China’s investment in clean energy is
extraordinary’

In China, on the other hand, a country that just a few decades ago was deeply
impoverished, much has already been done to redirect economic development. In
the Dec. 24 issue of WW we reported on how climate scientists in the U.S. are
taking note of China’s broad commitment to increased energy efficiency
and development of alternate, nonpolluting energy sources.

An extensive letter from China by Evan Osnos in the Dec. 21-28 New Yorker
magazine confirms this. Entitled “Green Giant — Beijing’s
crash program for clean energy,” it tells how, for years, the Chinese
government has been pumping billions of dollars into labs, universities and
enterprises so China could assimilate the new technological revolution into its
development plans.

“In 2006,” says Osnos, “Chinese leaders redoubled their
commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set
targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams and
other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United
States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again
the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry
in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other
country.”

Osnos says that U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International
Affairs David Sandalow, who had been to China five times in five months, told
him, “China’s investment in clean energy is
extraordinary.”

But the U.S. State Department and White House, who crafted Obama’s
aggressive strategy in Copenhagen, don’t know this?

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